Garden Update

Matthew always says it's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and while I'm not absolutely certain what that proverb actually means, he uses it as an alternative way of saying that every cloud has a silver lining. (There is some cloud/wind connection that makes sense to me.) Thus, I suppose one nice thing about last year's garden being such a non-starter is that I'm very pleased with the limited success I'm having so far this year. It's been very rainy the past few weeks, but I'm holding out hope that we will still get enough sun overall for a successful season. My little plants, if not exactly thriving, are at least alive and growing (in general - I had a bean and a pea plant that just sort of gave up the ghost, but what can I do if the plant does not have the will to survive?).

These are some peas waiting to be transferred to larger pots, which just arrived in the post yesterday, with the new compost, which has not been delivered yet. They're still a little delicate and it's been chilly lately, so I've been moving them inside at night but back outside during the day in the hopes that they'll get fertilised by passing insects. As you can see (if you look really closely), one is already growing a little pea pod! I've got four pods on the go at the moment, which - admittedly not an enormous crop - is enough to add to a very small salad.

This little pea has one of the other pods. I just don't get it; the peas seem to have almost sprouted from the soil with flowers just waiting to burst out, but the beans, while growing quite tall, aren't ready to flower yet. I guess they're shy...

It looks like the Great Tomato Debacle of '08 may be behind us - I've got at least 4 baby tomatoes growing and I reckon I could get as many as 10 or 12, just from this one pot! A couple of other plants have flowered, but most haven't. It isn't a completely unmitigated success, but I am getting pretty excited about the possibilities.

But speaking of unmitigated success, the spinach patch continues to amaze. We have eaten spinach every day for weeks and weeks, and it just keeps growing! This photo was taken after I picked two bags this morning to take to my friends Monika and Amy. And that was after I picked some for our dinner two nights ago, and enough to make a "Welcome to the building/sorry your stove doesn't work" spinach lasagne for our new upstairs neighbours just a few days before that! I've used it in quiches, lasagne, sag paneer, quesadillas and shredded it in tacos, though usually I just wilt it in a pan with a tiny bit of olive oil and water. A little salt and pepper and it's magic.

I don't know how these little guys are going to turn out, but so far they are doing brilliantly. On a whim, I planted parsnips, because we really like them roasted but they tend to be the most expensive of the root vegetables - several times more expensive than carrots, for example. If they carry on as they've been doing, we should have some fairly decent ones and probably enough for several batches of roast vegetables, so I'm already planning to plant loads more next year.

In fact, I've got lots of plans for next year, most of them half-formed and flying around my head randomly. I'm feeling pretty ruthless about some of our ornamental plants, especially the ones occupying our few sunny spots. Rocco has an apple tree of which I am getting very jealous. But I'm most excited about a current project. I have always heard that mint is very hardy and spreads, almost to the point of being invasive and that you shouldn't put it in a flower bed because it's so hard to control. We have a separate little bed built into the wall at the end of the garden. It doesn't get much sun and is in one of the paths that the cats and foxes use to get in and out of the garden. I've put a little mint plant in it a few days ago; for now, I'm watering it and waiting and every day I whisper to it, "Go wild! I know you can do it!"

We shall see.

4th of July - Cupcakes and Bunting

As per usual, we had a cook-out to celebrate the Fourth of July. The novelty this year was that we actually had it on the Fourth. Last year's was on the fifth, since US Independence Day is not recognised holiday in the UK and everyone had to work on the day. This despite the fact that, as Matthew points out, you'd think the British would've been glad to be rid of us if we were going to be so cranky and rebellious. Or something like that. He has a similar line about Thanksgiving, like being thankful to not have to deal with those dreadful colonials anymore. And then he usually says, "Present company excepted." Usually.

Anyway, we had some people over and had a nice day in the garden. It was lovely and hot, unlike the preceding week, which had been hellish and hot. Our practice barbecues paid off - in a way. Matthew has gotten pretty good at setting up the barbecue with the briquettes and firelighters but his attention still wavers and neither of us is very good at determining when things are cooked as opposed to just charred on the outside while still harbouring dangerous bacteria on the inside. Fortunately, the guests were there to help out. It was sort of audience participation, with everyone taking a turn to flip burgers or turn sausages or say, "Actually, this is still raw inside, I'm going to put it back on."

My position is that I cook inside the house, not in the garden, so I focused more on the baking. We had cupcakes again this year, with flags, sprinkles and little decorations that my parents sent in a pre-Independence Day care package. This is just a sample. There were many, many more than this. Thanks to my friend Adrienne for helping with the icing and decoration. To anyone who got little bits of paper stuck to the back of their flag deco, that was my fault, not hers! I think I have discovered the secret to good icing. I've tried margarine and real butter, with very disappointing results, but apparently the key is shortening. Or as they call it here, vegetable lard. Sounds yummy, huh?

I also made a Victoria sponge cake, which English people just love. It's like a layer cake, but without the icing. There is jam between the layers and the top is dusted with powdered sugar. I added fresh strawberries to this one and dusted the top just before cutting. There were obviously some issues with the filling, which was on the oozy side, but it still tasted very good.
To continue this summer's theme of all bunting, all the time, I made some special red, white and blue bunting, with fabric kindly supplied (and even cut!) by my mom. All I did was lay it out on the floor to decide on the order, then pin and sew. It was great. The flags are raw-edged, with the top folded into seam binding and zig-zag stitched.

And you know how at a party, everyone congregates in the kitchen, no matter how cramped? Apparently the same principle operates at barbecues, as you can see below. Everyone is crammed within 20 feet of the grill (just out of site to the left), while the other 2/3 of the garden is empty, except of deck chairs and a red/white/blue picnic blanket. I just don't get it. Though, to be fair, they may feel they need to keep an eye on the grill in case the cook wanders off.

The postscript is that today I have eaten half a blueberry muffin (Matthew's friend Vincent brought 2 dozen homemade muffins!), two cupcakes, a hamburger and sausage sandwich, and some baklava (brought by Adrienne). I feel slightly sick, but mostly in a good way. I like to think, the American way.

P.S. Apologies on the wonky formatting lately. Blogger is doing my head in!

Who Needs a Beach?

I had a very productive meeting with my dissertation tutor yesterday and have a big research day planned for tomorrow, so since Matthew had the day off, we spent it hanging around the house. We were actually much more productive than the following photographs would suggest. Matthew did more painting on the conservatory doors and frame. I did a lot of weeding and general gardening, washed and hung two loads of laundry, and put away my winter coats and scarves. Once that was all done, we sat in our deck chairs under the fig tree and read. I even read a school book - that's how dedicated I am. It's a pretty idyllic scene:

And so you can really see what it's like when in use, please see below, in which Matthew reads about crazy German terrorists while soaking up the sun:

Home Grown

This may not look very exciting but it really, really is. This is a lovely big bunch of spinach, which happens to be the first thing that we're eating out of our garden! It turns out that in addition to being quite strict with the plants, Rocco is also a bit sneaky and secretly planted spinach in one of our flower beds. I noticed the similarity to the spinach in his garden, so I didn't weed it out and the whole story came out today when I asked his opinion on whether our leafy things were edible.

And they are ever so edible when put into Turkish style baked eggs, which is what I had for dinner. The original recipe used rocket instead of spinach, but I like spinach better. Also, we now have a bunch of it growing for free in our back yard, so we're going to be eating a lot more of it. That said, I think you could probably make this with any cookable leafy green.

Baked Eggs with Yogurt and Chilli

300g spinach (or one bag of pre-washed)
4 eggs
150g plain yogurt
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
50g unsalted butter
1/2 tsp kirmizi biber (or chilli flakes mixed with paprika)
6 sage leaves, shredded (or a good shake of dried sage)

Pre-heat oven to 300F/150F. Wash the spinach and cook in pan over medium heat for 5-10 minutes - the water from rinsing should be enough to cook it in.

Transfer the spinach to a small, ovenproof dish and make four indentations in it. Carefully break an egg into each crater, taking care not to break the yolk. Place in the oven for 10-15 minutes, or until the egg whites set.

While the eggs are in the oven, mix together the yogurt and garlic along with a pinch of salt. Set aside - but do not chill.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the kirmizi biber and fry for a minute or two or until the butter foams and turns a nice golden-red. Add the sage and cook for a few more seconds, then remove from the heat.

Once the eggs are done, take the dish out of the oven. Spoon the yogurt mix over the centre and pour the hot chilli butter over the yogurt and eggs. Serve piping hot.

This makes a nice brunch item but I feel it isn't quite enough to go it alone. It needs accompaniment, by big mugs of tea or hot chocolate(!), fat slabs of toasted granary bread, a big bowl of oatmeal or muesli, and maybe some nice sausages. Or whatever you have for breakfast. That sounds really good to me and now I want to have breakfast for dinner - except that I've already had dinner. Oh well. A big mug of hot chocolate will be a pretty good dessert.

The Back Garden

I know it's almost June, but only in the past couple of weeks has it been consistently warm enough (though not necessarily sunny) that I'm convinced that it's actually Springtime. We've had fits and starts of nice weather for a while, but now it really seems to be sticking. Yay for sunshine! To celebrate, I took a tour of the back garden a few days ago.

This may not look like much at this point, but with any luck, this planter will supply us with tomatoes and lettuce. The lettuces are coming in really well, actually, and are already noticably bigger than in the photo. I've planted another container with lettuce and several more with tomatoes. We eat a lot of them in the summer and I'm hoping to improve over last year, when I got not a single tomato. Everyone I've talked to says it was generally a bad year for gardening, so hopefully it wasn't my black thumb that did it.

Our next door neighbour/gardener Rocco did a lot of work in our garden last year. We're trying to keep it up to a degree - he did clear out a lot of weeds and overgrowth, which definitely needed doing, but he is much more of a garden disciplinarian than I am and left the flowerbeds a bit bare - and even wanted to get rid of more. He divides plants into two general categories: pretty flowers and rubbish. Needless to say, we had a lot of rubbish. He wanted to get rid of this little rose bush, but I vetoed the removal. Its flowers aren't very impressive, but I find them very sweet and tiny.

I bought these little carnations last year and am happy to say they're doing well. They are just under the rose bush so I can see both from the back door.

This camelia is so impressive - the bloom is larger than my outspread hand. Another bloom is just opening up and there are two more buds, so I'm looking forward to a lengthy show.

I don't know what these purple flowers are, but we've got several clumps of them. I've seen them in other gardens and in parks, so they must be good. Plus, they made it past Rocco's cull last year, so I guess they qualify as "pretty flowers".

We have a single hollyhock (I think). It gets ridiculously tall, like three or four feet, and lasts a long time. I imagine a bunch of them would be very impressive, but for now we're making do with just one. Don't want to overdo it.

Rocco gave us several beautiful purple lillies (or irises - I don't know the difference). They're all blooming very impressively against the wall of the shed. I can see them from the kitchen window.

This jasmine also grows against the shed and it is gorgeous. I brought a sprig in the other day and you could smell it as soon as you walked in the door. Lots of fat, lazy bees hanging around, but they aren't too aggressive so we're co-existing peacefully.

And this vine I just don't get. The bottom of it is brown and shriveled; we thought it was dead and almost pulled it out. Then it started growing leaves and produced these very large, sort of alien-looking buds, which opened into large, strange flowers. I don't know what they are, but I like them.

And just 14 short months later...

...and I've got this far with the chair. Actually, there is a little bit of progress you can't see - I've also borrowed a staplegun from my friend Jane. The project is basically done. All I have to do now is use the original upholstery pieces as patterns for the new material, staple it on very neatly, figure out how to cover the back of the back panel, which doesn't have anything to staple to, find on the internet and order decorative tacks, then use said tacks to cover all the stapling.

I have a paper due on Thursday, but once that's done maybe I'll make a move on the chair. I really should, since I'd like to have it done in under two years and there are only 10 months left to go...

I also have some gardening projects lined up. At some point during the winter all my basil plants died. I was disgusted with them, and put them outside on the patio so I wouldn't have to look at them all brown and sticklike. This tough love approach actually worked with a clematis that's recently put out new leaves, but the basil just died, so I got a little new one at the grocery store yesterday, along with an assorted herb 6-pack and I need to repot them all. I've also got some begonia bulbs or seeds or pips or whatever they're called, and some tomato and parsnip seeds. Last year's tomato plants have pretty much all died, except one that has just recently produced two tomatoes (currently .5 in and .75 in diameter, respectively), which if they ever ripen will be the only fruit I got out of that crop. I'm going to try again this year and be very diligent about pinching shoots, fertilising, making sure the plants get enough sun, leaving them outside to be pollinated, and all that gardenerly stuff. I'm also going to use potting soil rather than dirt I dug up from the back yard, which I'm confident will make a big difference.

So far in the garden we've done some weeding and I planted some bulbs. I also decided to spruce up the three hanging planters on our garden wall since you can see them from the kitchen window and they were empty except for a dead geranium, some moss, and a handful of scraggly looking weeds. One of our challenges in gardening is that we have no idea what most of the plants are. Our neighbour Rocco, who is a retired gardner, seems to have only two categories of plants - "pretty flowers" or "rubbish". By his standards, most of the stuff in our garden is rubbish. So I took some things that I'm pretty sure are weeds but have pretty flowers on them at the moment and transplanted them into the planters. Pretty nice for weeds, huh?

Summer Time Greenery

It seems that summer was finally really arrived. It’s been sunny and warm not just for a couple of days, followed by cold, grey rain, but for almost two weeks now! It was almost too warm last night for our duvet, but I’m reticent to do anything about it just yet. When it’s really warm, we take the comforter out of the cover and use the cover alone as a light bedspread. Several weeks ago, I mistook a warm spell for actual summertime and took the duvet off the bed. Of course, we froze for a couple of nights before I broke down and admitted to myself that maybe night time temperatures in late May do warrant a big fluffy duvet, even with the additional warmth of a wool blanket, my beloved brown blanket, Matthew and one or two cats.

Anyway, now it’s lovely and hot (not two words that normally go together in Texas, but work well in England) and the garden is lush and green. Our next door neighbour/gardener Rocco is working on the garden to a plan that exists only in his mind – and seems to change week to week, so my gardening has been confined to the conservatory. I don’t want to get in his way. I must say, it’s going pretty well. I have two out-of-control basil plants that I’m trying to pinch and trim into bushier, less awkwardly tall shapes, a bushy basil with mites, the convalescing orchid, three agapanthus plants that were originally a single plant given by our friend Jane as a housewarming present, another plant from Jane (I can’t remember what it’s called but it’s sort of twiggy) and some tomato seedlings. Oh, and a hot pink plastic watering can.

The bushy, mite-y basil is sequestered on top of the CD shelf, with the orchid, which doesn’t have much to lose at this point, and an agapanthus and at a (hopefully) safe distance from the tomato plants. Since this photo, I have divided the tomatoes into three pots – none have died yet! – and the basil has moved to the table.

The orchid isn’t up to much at the moment. I did some research and apparently dark green leaves mean that the plant could use more sunlight. This one couldn’t get more light unless it were under a spotlight, but it still doesn’t look too happy. I think I’m not giving it enough water. Or too much. Hard to say.

This is our new plant table, which provides space for more plants and hides the cat box! We were having a problem with the cat box getting a bit smelly in the warm conservatory. Since the conservatory doubles as our dining room, this meant we were mostly eating at the coffee table. However, covering the box with the table and table cloth has made a huge difference – as has a can of industrial strength air sanitizer. I’ve been looking for a table for some time and even considered getting my dad to build something, then break it down and ship it, but Matthew found a little flat pack table at Argos for about £12.99, we bought and assembled it together, and our lives were significantly improved, all in the space of a single Sunday afternoon.

Plant Hospital

Yesterday I rescued a bloomless orchid from the office where I've been working. It had been on the desk for about 4 months and finally lost its final, withered flower that morning. We got a new one at Marks and Spencer and to keep it from going in the bin (and having heard that they will eventually bloom again), I took the old one home. Lots of people seemed interested in this and offered advice. One girl said she has one that is finally starting to bloom after a year. She keeps it in the bathroom because they like the humidity. Another girl said that if you give an orchid a contraceptive pill, it will bloom continually. I said, "Do you crush the pill and put it in the water?" She said she just sticks it in the soil. Then someone else asked if she has lots of extra contraceptive pills laying around. She said it only takes one. I don't know what her boyfriend thinks about this, but I didn't think it was my place to ask.

When I left in the evening, I got several comments:

Comment 1: Is it your last day? Are you taking your little plant?

Comment 2: Are you stealing that? (When I explained I was taking it home as it'd lost its flowers) Oh, are you good with orchids?

Comment 3: What is that? (I explained) Hmmm. (This was from the founding partner of the firm, when I ran into him on the tube platform. I couldn’t really read his “Hmmm.” It didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic.)

I don't have a picture of the plant in question. I'll try to take one tomorrow, even though right now the orchid is just five droopy leaves and some creepy-looking roots snaking out of the holes in the bottom of the pot. I'm not sure it was worth the effort of getting it home (in the cold and rain), but if it does bloom next year, I'll be thrilled that I got a £14.99 plant for free. Woo, and indeed, hoo.

Wordsworth in the Back Garden

I didn't notice the earthquake that apparently shook most of England (and some of Wales) in the wee small hours of the morning. But I did notice this morning that several of the daffodils in our back garden had fallen over. I don't think the two incidents are related. I brought the fallen soldiers inside, where they lend a springlike air to the mantel.

I never thought about it (and I'm not particularly "in tune" with the natural world) but I strongly associate flowers with particular places. These flowers seem so English to me; I can't look at them without thinking of Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud. I had a similar thing with the lilacs around my neighbourhood in Lawrence when I lived there. These flowers are so different from the ones I associate with spring and summer in Texas, the bluebonnets, wisteria, Queen Anne's lace, mimosa blossoms, azaleas, etc.

P.S. Ack! I've just made myself massively homesick by visiting the Texas Highways website in search of images of wildflowers. I am definitely going to have to have barbecue this weekend...

The Garden

It's cold and a little bit miserable in London at the moment. I realise it's pretty feeble to complain about it being a little chilly when much of the country is snowed in, but I have come to expect London to have better (or at least warmer) weather than the rest of the country. I feel it's our compensation for being targeted by terrorists and the fact that every public space is insanely overcrowded. If I had a car, I would probably add the congestion charge to that list of moans.

Anyway, despite the fact that it's cold and grey, I took these photos in our back garden yesterday. Practically cheerful and springlike, huh?